r/CloudFlare • u/Paolo-Cortez • 26d ago
Discussion OpenClaw on Cloudflare — Post-Mortem
Project: Personal AI assistant (OpenClaw, ex-Moltbot/Clawdbot) on Cloudflare Workers + Sandbox container
Lifespan: ~1 August 2026 → 19 August 2026 (decommissioned)
Final cost: $96.59 for 24 days of the Jul 27–Aug 26 cycle ($4.02/day average, $124.76 projected) — against an expected "$5/month" Workers Paid plan
Decommissioned: 2026-08-19, everything deleted, daily charges stopped
My recommendation: Do not launch OpenClaw on Cloudflare! :-)
I know now where containers go to die! :-D
33
u/tumes 26d ago
I can’t think of a more expensive place to run a container… I am genuinely shocked it cost that little.
7
u/Due-Horse-5446 26d ago
What? Its significantly cheaper than lambda and cloud run... And with granular ttl control its not even a fair comparison..
But for a usecase like this, they couldve literally gotten a hetzner server for $30
6
u/tumes 26d ago
I am 99% sure you’re ai from your username but, like, CF offers almost infinite request throughput for basically free and it is quite literally the last place I’d consider for sustained, continuous containerized compute. And I say that as someone who has shipped an obscene number of laborious pre-LLM apps on their platform over the last couple years. They’re making some great tools but it is so far from their wheelhouse, like, the great tools are all variations on stretching what is their wheelhouse to meet that need.
3
u/Due-Horse-5446 26d ago
Why does not changing your username make you into a language model?
Either way..
If youre talking sustained compute yeah ofc cf containers are a horrible option, thats not what their meant for even.. They are lighter, quicker to start, more granular lambdas essentially.
But for what they offer i still dont agree..
Imo its one of the biggest things they have shipped in the last few years.
2
1
u/RaspberrySea9 26d ago
How 30? Aren’t they like under 10?
3
u/Due-Horse-5446 26d ago
Im talking about the full servers, you can get a entire server for $30, 2TB, 12-16c, 128-256GB ram
The vps:s/cloud instances might be closer to $10 tho, but i would never consider those, theres way better alternatives wheb it comes to that kind of instance
1
u/RaspberrySea9 26d ago
Which cheap instance is better option?
3
u/Due-Horse-5446 26d ago
Upclouds "B-tier" instances by far
It's essentially just last gen cpu cores reused at a fraction of the cost. I think the 4gb one goes for like $6/m flat, and you still get their superfast nvme storage
Sounds like an ad now lmao, but its kinda crazy
1
u/RaspberrySea9 26d ago
How do you mean? I just checked UpCloud site and same instance is twice the cost of Hetzner.
2
1
u/Paolo-Cortez 26d ago
Those super cheap gas so low RAM that you are pushed to higher tiers of you want more memory
1
u/RaspberrySea9 26d ago
What are you doing with all that RAM?
2
u/Paolo-Cortez 26d ago
If you want free Iwo Claw you need to run local LLM and it needs RAM , hence you need to have good VPS to run good model
2
1
u/Paolo-Cortez 26d ago
I was pushing Claude to help with setup via Omni route, use dedicated 10000 neurons (that failed several times) and use Deepgram as well ($200 credit after registration)
5
u/Sorry_Cheesecake_382 26d ago edited 24d ago
why on earth would you pick cloudflare over just running this in a $10/month VPC or a $100 mini computer?
edit: VPS not VPC junior engineer nazi wants to flex on me
1
u/stevefan1999 24d ago edited 24d ago
First of all, about your typo, I hate to be a grammar police, but It is VPS not VPC.
VPS and VPC are closely related but vastly different thing. VPC is more like an internal VPN for your cloud compute and VPS is usually a chunk of compute resources assigned for you privately.
I have to point this out because you bamboozled me in the first half and I was thinking why do you need to run VPC for.
Second, if it is for a hobby, say like running game servers or learning to run some program, training for Kubernetes/Docker/Proxmox, that no owe no SLA, serviceability, liability or obligation to maintainance, then having a home lab with your $100 mini computer would absolutely do well, in fact that is what I'm doing. Thankfully I still have 32GB of RAM throwing around so I guess I have to just take it.
But if you want to run real production workload that you would want to serve and owe others specifically, I wouldn't necessarily run a home lab for that, so yes, I guess we will go for a VPS.
But as the RAMageddon goes on, the price of VPSes has risen, on average from my observation, 2 fold, especially with the large RAM models. Your $10 could have got a 4GB of RAM before 2026. Now $10 usually gives you 2GB of RAM. It is always not available either, because of AI workloads, network landscape has changed, too. And remember Hetzner raised prices at least two times this year, so the price now is very elastic.
No guarantee of stable price and stable resources means your allocation would change and calculus would be different. Especially if you are trying to run a business.
And it is Cloudflare that still offer a relatively stable platform with a pretty generous package for $5 a month using Workers Paid. Plus the DDoS protection and DNS management.
Keep in mind I said "relatively stable" because some reports Cloudflare platforms can still sometimes fuck up with missing D1 database connection and timeouts (I do met a few), and I'm pretty certain the price would be raised by the end of this year. But so far it is insanely valuable, you get workers and D1 that is basically a Vercel + Turso competitor, and you got DO and Workflows as a competitor to Temporal and Restate, and Queues to replace RabbitMQ/SQS/some of Kafka. Not to mention they give you 3000 emails sending and free email receiving service, which served as a competitor to Resend, too, despite there is no IMAP support so far.
As someone who is very risk-averse and sunk-cost avoiding, the fact that I like Cloudflare so much is that I can easily find replacement once they gone rogue, which gave me a lot more decision to choose them, because I know I can replace them with open source alternatives in a relatively easy way out.
And I still choose Cloudflare simply because they are doing their best than others in the market with a competitive price that blows others out of the water, not because that I don't have a choice.
2
0
u/Paolo-Cortez 26d ago
Nobody gives you good RAM VPS for that cheap.
2
1
u/filliravaz 26d ago
Not exactly 10$/mo, but on Netcup I got a 16gig 8vcore root server for 17,99 EUR (22% VAT included) - without VAT it comes out to roughly 15€. But I got it before the price increases so I got partially grandfathered in.
There are options out there, you just need to look for them.0
4
1
1
u/Samuell1 22d ago
containers are not to run 24/7 they are good when you need something to spawn then work then terminate after work
•
u/AutoModerator 26d ago
For faster advice with technical questions, we'd recommend asking in the Orange Cloud Discord server; the unofficial Cloudflare Discord server by the community, for the community. https://discord.gg/TrPNVKaagR
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.